Found My Forever

Making Beautiful Things with the One You Love

This one’s not about Betsy. She directly relates to the secondary title there, because she is in fact a beautiful thing that her father and I made together, one of the first of many beautiful things. But this is about a different beautiful thing he and I made. I was actually going to post this on The Producer, Ian’s Substack, but he wanted me to share it here. Betsy has been the catalyst for many important changes in our life, one of them being a major kickstart to our musical collaboration.

Ian and I actually met because of music (long story short, he asked me out after seeing me perform Torn by Natalie Imbruglia at karaoke). Since then we have actually become karaoke DJs ourselves with a few regular gigs, including a weekly show at the very restaurant where we met, and he has started a record company. You may have read a previous post of mine on Ian’s account, Filament about the song he wrote for Betsy, which we recorded and released as my first original single. While I have yet to nail down my own personal style (my tastes are all over the map), and I’ve always made up little songs on the fly just for fun, I’ve never considered myself a real songwriter. Ian and I actually have a few projects we’ve begun writing together that have been on the backburner. He wrote a post about one of them called Making Sausage #1 and that’s a song we’ll be finishing soon. (Making Sausage is the name of his post, not the name of the song. I feel the need to clarify that.) In fact, while I am in the kitchen writing this, he is in the studio working on that song, and I can’t wait to hear what he does with it. Anyway, the main thing that really made me feel like a real live songwriter was a little ditty called Found My Forever.

We’ve got quite a few regulars at our weekly karaoke gig, and we’ve gotten to know some of them pretty well. One such pair of regulars is Lisa and Russ. They’ve been coming I think since before Betsy was born. When we first met them they weren’t even engaged yet, and as of now they’ve been married for several months. Lisa has a lovely voice and is always a crowd pleaser—especially when she does Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You. She sings anything from Whitney to Shania Twain, the Fugees, Lady Gaga, Journey, Maren Morris, I could go on. Listening to someone sing songs they love nearly every week for almost two years, well, you kinda get to know their tastes and their style and range. Not too long ago, Lisa discovered that we had been writing and producing songs, and she immediately wanted to know if we’d help her with a project. Her plan was to write a love song for Russ as a Christmas surprise. She said she was good at coming up with lyrics, but not necessarily melodies for them, and didn’t know anything about composing music to go with them.

So here’s what ended up happening. She sent me a copy of the wedding vows she wrote for Russ. Based on his experience listening to her sing every week, Ian came up with an instrumental track that he thought would suit her. He printed out the vows she had sent me, and we sat down in the studio with the track he had composed to see what we could make of it. Since this was my first time writing under these circumstances, I had a tough go of it in the beginning. I was completely stumped and not sure really how to start. Buuuuut…after employing a few secret tricks of the trade, suddenly everything clicked into place. And what happened next was absolutely magical for Ian and me.

If you’ve ever been in what they call a “flow state,” you know this feeling. In just a few short minutes, her vows became rhyming verses, three of them to be exact, with choruses, a bridge, and an outro. The cadence of the lyrics seemed like they would fit perfectly with Ian’s instrumental, so we gave it a go. Armed with just the lyric sheet in my hand, I sat at the mic and he started the track. As I listened to the music, it all just came to me and I sang it. I sang it like Lisa, not like Kristen, even straining a bit since her voice is a little higher than mine. The whole thing just flowed out of me and was almost perfect from the first take. Almost. We definitely had to adjust some lyrics here and there, fix some rhythm issues, some other small tweaks. But this was Lisa’s song, everything about it felt like her to us, and we could even hear her voice singing it in our heads. Ian got the demo together as fast as he could and we emailed it to her.

She LOVED it. Absolutely loved it. Which made our flow state high feel even higher! She immediately started listening to it nonstop so she could learn it and be ready to record her own vocals. In fact, she was so excited about it that by the time she came over to do that, the cat was out of the bag. She couldn’t stop herself from telling Russ about it, and he came with her to the studio. It took two separate recording sessions to get everything just right, and Ian ended up adding some strings to the track, as well as some extra bass and double-tracking her vocals in a few places. I love how Lisa really made it her own as well, adjusting the lyrics and melody in a few places to make it suit her better, as well as suggesting a few changes to the music that improved it even more. This song was literally made for her, and she did an absolutely lovely job singing it. As of last week, it was finalized and submitted to all the main music streaming and downloading platforms. Lisa has now accomplished a major life goal in having her first song released professionally, and that song is a heartfelt ballad written for the love of her life.

You can listen to or download Found My Forever by clicking or tapping this button.

I hope you will listen to this song, and I hope it touches your heart. I cannot in any way express how much it means to me to be a part of something so beautiful. Helping someone make their dreams come true is a truly magnificent experience. And doing that by collaborating with my own love makes it that much sweeter. Ian and I work well together on a lot of things, and this song in particular is so special to us. It taught us both a little more about ourselves and what we are capable of, especially working together. We feel more united and stronger as a team, and we feel inspired to keep going, seeing what other beautiful things the two of us can put into the world. You can read Ian’s take on the process here:

Making Sausage #2

Humans are born to create, it’s just who we are. We are all natural artists, each with our own unique talents and abilities. We need to write, build, draw, dance, sing, play, design. All of our different feelings can be expressed creatively, I think we actually need for them to be, and doing so makes the world better. So go out there today and make something. Be and express the beautiful human that you are.